This article extends bimetric formulations of massive gravity to make the mass of the graviton to depend on its environment. This minimal extension offers a novel way to reconcile massive gravity with local tests of general relativity without invoking the Vainshtein mechanism. On cosmological scales, it is argued that the model is stable and that it circumvents the Higuchi bound, hence relaxing the constraints on the parameter space. Moreover, with this extension the strong coupling scale is also environmentally dependent in such a way that it is kept sufficiently higher than the expansion rate all the way up to the very early universe, while the present graviton mass is low enough to be phenomenologically interesting. In this sense the extended bigravity theory serves as a partial UV completion of the standard bigravity theory. This extension is very generic and robust and a simple specific example is described.
The recently proposed chameleonic extension of bigravity theory, by including a scalar field dependence in the graviton potential, avoids several fine-tunings found to be necessary in usual massive bigravity. In particular it ensures that the Higuchi bound is satisfied at all scales, that no Vainshtein mechanism is needed to satisfy solar-system experiments, and that the strong coupling scale is always above the scale of cosmological interest all the way up to the early universe. This paper extends the previous work by presenting a stable example of cosmology in the chameleon bigravity model. …
In this paper we study the generation of primordial perturbations in a cosmological setting of bigravity during inflation. We consider a model of bigravity which can reproduce the $Λ$CDM background and large scale structure and a simple model of inflation with a single scalar field and a quadratic potential. Reheating is implemented with a toy-model in which the energy density of the inflaton is entirely dissipated into radiation. We present analytic and numerical results for the evolution of primordial perturbations in this cosmological setting. We find that the amplitude of tensor perturbati…
We study spherically symmetric solutions in a four-parameter Einstein-Cartan-type class of theories. These theories include torsion, as well as the metric, as dynamical fields, and contain only two physical excitations (around flat spacetime): a massless spin-2 excitation and a massive spin-2 one (of mass $ m_2 \equiv κ$). They offer a geometric framework (which we propose to call "torsion bigravity") for a modification of Einstein's theory that has the same spectrum as bimetric gravity models. We find that the spherically symmetric solutions of torsion bigravity theories exhibit several remar…
We consider modified gravity which may describe the early-time inflation and/or late-time cosmic acceleration of the universe. In particular, we discuss the properties of $F(R)$, $F(G)$, string-inspired and scalar-Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet gravities, including their FRW equations and fluid or scalar-tensor description. Simplest accelerating cosmologies are investigated and possibility of unified description of the inflation with dark energy is described. The cosmological reconstruction program which permits to get the requested universe evolution from modified gravity is developed. As some extensi…
The possibility to have singular accelerated evolution in the context of $F(R)$ bimetric gravity is investigated. Particularly, we study two singular models of cosmological evolution, one of which is a singular modified version of the Starobinsky $R^2$ inflation model. As we demonstrate, for both models in some cases, the slow-roll parameters become singular at the Type IV singularity, a fact that we interpret as a dynamical instability of the theory under study. This dynamically instability may be an indicator of graceful exit from inflation and we thoroughly discuss this scenario and the int…
In this paper, we propose a toy model of the renormalizable theory describing massive spin two field. Although the model is renormalizable, we show that the model contains ghost. The coupling of the theory with gravity can be regarded as a new kind of bimetric gravity or bigravity. We show that the massive spin two field plays the role of the cosmological constant.
We report that a class of three-dimensional bimetric theories contain asymptotically flat solutions. These spacetimes can be cast in a set of asymptotic conditions at null infinity which are preserved under the infinite dimensional BMS group. Moreover, the algebra of the canonical generators exhibits a central extension. The possibility that these solutions describe regular black holes is also discussed.
In the context of massive (bi-)gravity non-minimal matter couplings have been proposed. These couplings are special in the sense that they are free of the Boulware-Deser ghost below the strong coupling scale and can be used consistently as an effective field theory. Furthermore, they enrich the phenomenology of massive gravity. We consider these couplings in the framework of bimetric gravity and study the cosmological implications for background and linear tensor, vector, and scalar perturbations. Previous works have investigated special branch of solutions. Here we perform a complete perturba…
The origin of the graviton from string theory is well understood: it corresponds to a massless state in closed string spectra, whose low-energy effective action, as extracted from string scattering amplitudes, is that of Einstein-Hilbert. In this work, we explore the possibility of such a string-theoretic emergence of ghost-free bimetric theory, a recently proposed theory that involves two dynamical metrics, that around particular backgrounds propagates the graviton and a massive spin-2 field, which has been argued to be a viable dark matter candidate. By choosing to identify the latter with a…
We study the ghost-free bimetric theory of Hassan and Rosen, with parameters $β_i$ such that a flat Minkowski solution exists for both metrics. We show that, expanding around this solution and eliminating one of the two metrics with its own equation of motion, the remaining metric is governed by the Einstein-Hilbert action plus a non-local term proportional to $W_{μνρσ} (\Box-m^2)^{-1}W^{μνρσ}$, where $W_{μνρσ}$ is the Weyl tensor. The result is valid to quadratic order in the metric perturbation and to all orders in the derivative expansion. This example shows, in a simple setting, how such n…
We propose a scenario that can naturally explain the observed dark matter-baryon ratio in the context of bimetric theory with a chameleon field. We introduce two additional gravitational degrees of freedom, the massive graviton and the chameleon field, corresponding to dark matter and dark energy, respectively. The chameleon field is assumed to be non-minimally coupled to dark matter, i.e., the massive graviton, through the graviton mass terms. We find that the dark matter-baryon ratio is dynamically adjusted to the observed value due to the energy transfer by the chameleon field. As a result,…
We construct a class of theories which extend New Massive Gravity to higher orders in curvature in any dimension. The lagrangians arise as limits of a new class of bimetric theories of Lovelock gravity, which are unitary theories free from the Boulware-Deser ghost. These Lovelock bigravity models represent the most general non-chiral ghost-free theories of an interacting massless and massive spin-two field in any dimension. The scaling limit is taken in such a way that unitarity is explicitly broken, but the Boulware-Deser ghost remains absent. This automatically implies the existence of a hol…
We study the background cosmology of the ghost-free, bimetric theory of gravity. We perform an extensive statistical analysis of the model using both frequentist and Bayesian frameworks and employ the constraints on the expansion history of the Universe from the observations of supernovae, the cosmic microwave background and the large scale structure to estimate the model's parameters and test the goodness of the fits. We explore the parameter space of the model with nested sampling to find the best-fit chi-square, obtain the Bayesian evidence, and compute the marginalized posteriors and mean …
In this work we investigate the existence of relativistic models for dark matter in the context of bimetric gravity, used here to reproduce the modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND) at galactic scales. For this purpose we consider two different species of dark matter particles that separately couple to the two metrics of bigravity. These two sectors are linked together \textit{via} an internal $U(1)$ vector field, and some effective composite metric built out of the two metrics. Among possible models only certain classes of kinetic and interaction terms are allowed without invoking ghost degrees …
We consider the possibility that the massive graviton is a viable candidate of dark matter in the context of bimetric gravity. We first derive the energy-momentum tensor of the massive graviton and show that it indeed behaves as that of dark matter fluid. We then discuss a production mechanism and the present abundance of massive gravitons as dark matter. Since the metric to which ordinary matter fields couple is a linear combination of the two mass eigenstates of bigravity, production of massive gravitons, i.e. the dark matter particles, is inevitably accompanied by generation of massless gra…
